A Rant about Video Game Magazines.

Today I was stuck in a very isolated town for five hours. The town had a newsagent, so I went in and eventually purchased this magazine. It’s called PCPowerPlay, and it’s an Australian video game mag. Hey, it was either this or get BiggerBoobies and the old girl behind the counter was giving me the evil eye so my courage failed me.

Let’s get right to the point; this magazine is turgid. Reading this magazine made me want to cut off my tongue and shove it up my own arse. I knew it was going to be bad when I read the editorial. Written by some dude named David Wildgoose, it is an attempt at stream-of-consciousness-induced schizophrenia. In it, he has a conversation with himself that doesn’t come close to making any sense. What it does convey however, is someone trying very hard to be hip and cool. If this was the standard of the editorial, it didn’t garner a wealth of promise for the articles that were to come. After all, this guy must have edited them.

The articles ranged from bad to incomprehensible. Let me give you a brief example:

“… Lo, praise the prowess of Simkings, of sword armed hero-Sims, in spinoff games, and what honour the franchise won. No game have I known, so nobly brought charming tales and a more hailed genre mix, than Sims Medieval, for sooth and for fun. Feast on the story of the Megalot, of heroic deeds and villians undone.”

Makes you want to start licking your own butt crack, doesn’t it.

What is it with these so-called “writers” that they are unable to immediately delve into a topic, but must make the poor reader wander drunkenly through their miserable excuse for prose in a vain attempt to discover just what the fuck they are actually talking about? It seems to be a standard “technique” in magazine and newspaper articles today. The more vague and esoteric you seem to be, the cooler your writing actually is. This is all well and good I suppose, but occasionally it would be nice to understand what the topic of the piece is before you reach the end of it. There is an article on the inside back cover, the space usually reserved for the best bits of a publication, which has the title:

GAME OF THRONES

It then goes on to open in the following way:

“… Vic and I stood on the blasted heath and after a minute Vic swung his sword and cut the head off the guy who was lying on the ground for no reason. Vic turned to me, magnificent in his great bearskin coat, iron crown on his shaggy head.”

The last paragraph goes like this:

“… ‘FOR THE HONOUR OF OUR FOREFATHERS!’ screamed Vic. And then – because after all, no matter the glory of the sunset or the authentic chill of frost, I was still playing on PC – everything went blue.”

Yes, it really is written with that punctuation. The bits in between those two bits give no further clue to what the whole bit is meant to mean. Maybe it’s meant to mean that you can write a gob-smack of complete rubbish and still get it published. The thing that gets my goat is that these type of mags were exactly the same 20 years ago. They still haven’t got any better. They were shit then, and they’re still shit now. Every in-game photo snap has to have some “witty” caption designed to show how really achingly funny these guys are. Why are we as a video game audience still treated like a bunch of imbeciles? I suppose these clowns could use the excuse that their customers are not able to read for them not being able to write. But every gamer that I have ever known has for the most part been able to rub at least two brain cells together.

Oh, there was one well written article about Nethack. I better buy the next issue then.

Rant over, normal service will resume when I fucking well feel like it.

It was actually because I was scared due to the fact that her boobies were even bigger than the ones on the magazine cover, and I was terrified that she was going to say something like, “Well if you like big boobies …”